Mobile machines, such as earthmoving and construction vehicles, often include a large undercarriage assembly for support and movement. The undercarriage assembly may include several components, such as an endless track, a drive mechanism, rollers, and idlers, that contact and move relative to each other to propel the machine. This relative movement and the resulting vibrations, however, cause the undercarriage assembly to be undesirably noisy. For example, metal track links may directly contact metal tread portions of an idler wheel, creating metal-on-metal contact and vibration that produces loud noise during operation of the associated machine.
In order to help reduce the amount of noise produced by an undercarriage assembly, various sound suppression devices have been implemented. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 3,127,211 (the '211 patent) issued to Kordes et al. on Mar. 31, 1964, discloses a wheel assembly that employs an elastic member placed between a rim and a wheel body. In particular, the '211 patent describes a rail vehicle wheel with an elastically supported rim in which two annular elastic inserts may be provided between the wheel body and the rim.
Although the rail vehicle wheel of the '211 patent may provide some dampening of vibration and noise by employing elastic inserts, the arrangement in the '211 patent may have limitations. For example, forces exerted by the rim on the elastic inserts may be so great as to repeatedly compress the elastic inserts beyond their elastic limit. This may lead to early failure of the elastic inserts. Also, the arrangement of the rim relative to the elastic inserts and the wheel body may cause the elastic inserts of the '211 patent to potentially experience both tension and compression and incur destructive shear forces under side loading.
Another attempt to help dampen vibration of a wheel includes a ring-shaped flange that is attached to an outer edge of an idler wheel assembly. The ring-shaped flange encloses a space near the outer diameter of the idler wheel, which may be filled with tar. While this construction may help dampen some vibration, it may be less than ideal. In particular, there is room for improvement to the overall dampening and noise reduction produced by this design. For example, the use of a single dampening material may allow some noise to easily propagate through the device.
The present disclosure is directed to overcoming one or more of the problems set forth above and/or other problems of the prior art.